Harry Styles
Fine Line
AUDIO CD
BRAND NEW FACTORY SEALED
Columbia Records
19439705122
UPC | 194397051223
2019
TRACK LISTING
01. Golden
02. Watermelon Sugar
03. Adore You
04. Lights Up
05. Cherry
06. Falling
07. To Be So Lonely
08. She
09. Sunflower, Vol. 6
10. Canyon Moon
11. Treat People with Kindness
12. Fine Line
Though Harry Styles Superstar would have been a gloriously mad album, Fine Line is not the magical mystery tour one might have assumed the breakout One Direction heartthrob set his sights on following his classic-rock-inspired debut, Harry Styles. But it’s not him suddenly declaring, “OK, boomer,” either. Like his brilliant uniform of flowing, high-waisted trousers and shagadelic chest-baring shirts — loud retro looks hot off the Gucci runway — it’s a streamlined, party-ready, primary-colors take on the enduring concept of the rock & roll starman. It’s also as much as fun as anyone short of Bruno Mars is having with a band these days. (Especially when Styles, an irresistible flirt of a singer, gets playful like he does on heartbreaker ballad “Cherry,” dragging out the word “haaaating” from “I’m hating it” like he’s repeating a favorite line from Clueless.)
With short-story lyrics about a family man’s life of quiet desperation and a six-minute build to wailing guitar drama, “She” might be the closest thing here to a “Sign of the Times“-style homage to Bowie and the Beatles. But the Sixties and Seventies signifiers sprinkled throughout the album — a little organ, some clavinet and even George Harrison specials like electric sitar and sarangi — are expertly Vitamixed into pop-rock smoothies you can dance to, like the strutting “Adore You” and soulful “Lights Up.”
Aided by genre-fluid songwriters like Kid Harpoon, Jeff Bhasker, Greg Kurstin, and Amy Allen, Styles is also now mining some rich millennial veins as well. Busy and beachy, “Sunflower Vol. 6” could sit next to Vampire Weekend on any playlist. The title track emerges from a darkly beautiful Bon Iver-like haze into a big, semi-hopeful, brass-and-martial-drums finish; with a measure of uncertainty fitting the close of this chaotic decade, Styles promises: “We’ll be all right.”
That “we,” as the Harries will surely speculate, may be Styles and his ex, the French model Camille Rowe. Indeed, the grand rock-album tradition in which Fine Line indulges is not the long strange trip but the totally predictable breakup. Even the dreamily propulsive opening track, “Golden,” in which Styles compares thee to a summer’s day that “browns my skin just right,” finds him foreshadowing the inevitable sunset: “I don’t wanna be alone / When it ends.”
No Talmudic study of the lyrics will be required of the stans. If the “I just miss your accent and your friends” breadcrumbs in “Cherry” don’t suffice, the recording of Rowe giggling and speaking in French should take them home. But as perfectly suited to binging on Spotify and dissecting on Twitter as the album may be, it’s how consciously he uncouples here that truly sets him apart from the old testament rock gods. “I’m just an arrogant son of a bitch who can’t admit when he’s sorry,” he confesses in the syncopated slow-burner “To Be So Lonely.” In the otherwise forgettable ballad “Falling,” he channels every woman hounded by a needy guy (or worse), asking, “What if I’m someone I don’t want around?” If there’s a nontoxic masculinity, Harry Styles just might’ve found it. And that’s the kind of magic mushrooms can’t buy.
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